Quick & Dirty: MarkDown to PDF

Writing from a developers point of view and writing from a PBA studies examinators point of view are very different things. Developers want to write code and slam documentation into MarkDown files they can track with git (assumption). PBA examinators want a footnote drenched, printable document, that belongs back in the 1970s (fact).

For my last hand-in I’ve created a quick & dirty script, that does just that to your MarkDown files.

Footnotes in MarkDown

To create footnotes in MarkDown you need an interpreter that supports them (the editor is secondary, only the output counts in the end). So by interpreter I mean something like pandoc, which gracefully handles footnotes.

The MarkDown syntax for footnotes is mostly the following:

read more about [Heisenberg]^[this text appears in the footnote]

Automated Table of Contents in MarkDown

Yes, I admit, this one is very practical, especially because it by default is created so the headlines are linked and appear in PDF readers that support these chapter like anchors. Pandoc can create those for you too and it works like a charm.

Do you compile MarkDown?

If you use MarkDown, you’re likely to encounter people who don’t. So do you compile it to another format to ship it off? I for example regularly compile my blog posts to HTML from it.